Sniffing Out Meth Labs With Sewage

"The world of espionage is not divorced from the rest of the world," says Thomas Boghardt, the International Spy Museum's historian says.
That became even evident this week when The FBI announced the arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies living and working in the United States and a couple of years ago, when the CIA released World War II era personnel files, including one for chef Julia Child, who did admin work for the intelligence service back when she was Julia McWilliams.
And because spies live and work among us, they need every day objects to conceal their secret files and transmissions.
In the previous century, technology we may find quaint today was invaluable for covert operations. The broadest collection of these gadgets can be found at The International Spy Museum, one of a few spy museums in the world. The Central Intelligence Agency also has a museum in Langley, but it can only be visited with an invitation. There is, however, a virtual tour.
While you wait on that special invitation, Boghardt shines a light on 10 famous -- and infamous -- spy gadgets housed at the International Spy Museum, which is open to the public:

Getty Images/Colin Anderson

View Caption+#2: 10. Lipstick Pistol

"It's a classic," Boghardt says of this 4.5 millimeter single-shot weapon, presumably taken from a KGB agent in the mid-1960s. While it's unclear whether this dangerous "kiss of death" was ever used, a cyanide pistol was used for assassination in that era. These covert weapons are surviving examples of the "active measures" that were taken in this time period, unlike many of their intended targets.

International Spy Museum

View Caption+#3: 9. Coat Camera

This little camera, Model F-21 issued by the KGB around 1970, was concealed in a buttonhole and has a release that the wearer presses from a pocket. Just squeeze the shutter cable and the fake button opens to capture an image.
Hidden, portable cameras could be used at public events such as political rallies without detection. Boghardt notes that the Spy Museum's director Peter Earnest, who worked for many years in the CIA on intelligence, has used one of these cameras.

International Spy Museum

View Caption+#4: 8. Microdot Camera

In the 1960s, the East German foreign intelligence service HVA issued this tiny camera, which takes photos of documents and uses a chemical process to shrink the text down so that a block of text appears no bigger than a period. This way agents could hide secret messages in plain sight. Boghardt points to an infamous incident involving microdots: Dusko Popov, a double agent during World War II, gave microdots to the FBI that mentioned German interest in Pearl Harbor. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover didn't trust Popov, however, so he never passed the information to president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

International Spy Museum

View Caption+#5: 7. Shoe with Heel Transmitter

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Western diplomats in Eastern Europe avoided buying suits there, preferring to mail order clothing and shoes from the West. In Romania, the secret service used this to their advantage, working with the postal service to install a transmitter in shoe heels. Boghardt says that the recording device was discovered during a routine room sweep that revealed a signal, but the signal disappeared when all the diplomats left the room.

International Spy Museum

View Caption+#6: 6. Enigma Cipher Machine

Messages sent over the wireless in the World War II era could be intercepted so the Germans used a cryptographic device. On the surface, the Enigma cipher machine looked like a regular typewriter, but it wasn't. A keyboard was linked to rotors, powered by an electric current, which transposed every keystroke several times. Corresponding messages went out in Morse code and required keys, which changed daily, to decipher -- get it? "De-cipher. " Which is exactly what the Allies did, cracking a code the Germans thought was unbreakable.

International Spy Museum

View Caption+#7: 5. Cipher Disk

It's tempting to think that spy gadgets aren't all that old, but even Caesar encoded messages using cryptography. This disk dates back to the Civil War, when it was used by the Confederate side -- CSA stands for Confederate States of America.
It's pretty obvious how the device works: rotate the inner wheel to displace the letters. M = G, P = J, etc. Simple to crack, right? Not if the message is written in a language you don't know. Spies were tricky like that.

International Spy Museum

View Caption+#8: 4. Bulgarian Umbrella

A Bulgarian secret agent used an umbrella just like this one on a London street to kill Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978. A standard umbrella was modified internally to inject poison into its target with the press of the trigger. In Markov's case, the umbrella contained a ricin pellet, which is next to impossible to trace.
The museum displays a replica, made specially in Moscow for the collection. Boghardt says that in 1991, a room full of similar deadly umbrellas was uncovered in Bulgaria.

International Spy Museum

View Caption+#9: 3. Pigeon Camera

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a spy satellite! Before the dawn of aerial photography, pigeons did the job. Flying over enemy territory with a camera on autoshoot, pigeons could provide crucial information without getting lost along the way. Beyond photography, the birds also carried messages at times when radio communication was spotty or down. Pigeons sent through enemy fire up until the 1950s had a 95 percent success rate and were duly decorated with medals of honor for their service.

International Spy Museum

View Caption+#10: 2. Tree Stump Bug

This tree stump bug used solar power to function continuously in a wooded area near Moscow during the early 1970s. The bug intercepted communications signals coming from a Soviet air base in the area and them beamed them to a satellite, which then sent the signals to a site in the United States. Solar power meant that no risky battery changes were needed. Nevertheless, the KGB discovered this green bug so the museum's copy is a replica.

International Spy Museum

View Caption+#11: 1. Dog Doo Transmitter

Dog doo? Really? Boghardt says this, er, doohickey has a hollowed-out space inside, ideal for holding a message so that case officers and sources could communicate without raising suspicion. Doo tends to be left alone, which is why beacons disguised as tiger excrement were used to mark targets in Vietnam, Boghardt says. One of the risks is obviously that such a device would be thrown away or discovered by someone accidentally.
"Accidents happened all the time," the historian says. "That's one of the challenges of being a spy or case officer."

Scientists have tested a device that can detect meth in sewage lines near places of suspected meth use or manufacture. The successful test of the Polar Organic Chemical Integrative Sampler (POCIS) by Tennessee Technological University researchers demonstrates a new way that law enforcement might be able to zero in on illicit drug cookers.

The three locations studied in Cookeville, Tenn., were among those already published in the local newspaper as places where meth busts had occurred, explained Tennessee Tech environmental chemist Tammy Boles. The POCIS was placed directly in the raw sewage for four weeks to collect any possible methamphetamine coming out of a nearby lines from the buildings. Meth was found in sewage from one of three sampling sites at a significant concentration, reported Boles and Martha J.M. Wells in their paper in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal Science of the Total Environment.

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The POCIS device works by having an absorbent material sandwiched between two membranes which let water and dissolved chemicals pass through it. The absorbent traps and collects chemicals. When the POCIS is pulled out of the waste water, the absorbent layer is analyzed in a lab to discover what chemicals it has gathered during its time underwater.

Boles cautioned that the meth they detected in the Cookeville sewage could have been from either manufacture or from the urine of meth users – since meth passes through the human body chemically intact. So intact, she said, that some meth labs have been found filled with jugs of urine from meth users intending to recycle the drug.

"It's crazy that people do to make this," said Boles, whose study was funded by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Bole's paper is the first to demonstrate how the POCIS device could be useful to law enforcement in locating and closing down clandestine meth labs.

"The paper showed a proof of concept that it is possible to qualitatively determine either presence, or absence, of a polar compound of interest in raw sewage," said research chemist Tammy Jones-Lepp of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The POCIS approach contrasts with grab sampling of sewage waters, she explained, which only shows what's in waste water for a brief moment. "Whereas, with POCIS the deployments can last for several days to weeks, giving a more holistic understanding of any emerging contaminants present over a longer period of time."

Boles is careful to point out that the new technique could pose ethical issues, especially with regards to privacy, and so they were careful to put the POCIS devices only in city-owned waste water lines. Their goal in this prove the technique would work, not actually indict anyone at this time. "We don't want to identify where we found it," she said. "That's not our goal."

The work also has implications for waste water treatment plants, which are charged with cleaning waters despite the fact that they often don't know what compounds -- like meth or pharmaceuticals -- is in waste water.

"Sampling, and the reporting of emerging contaminants, such as pharmaceuticals, has been on-going in the U.S. for over 10 years and longer in the EU," said Jones-Lepp. Some water authorities in the United States have been using both grab sampling and POCIS samplers already to get a better handle on what's entering their waste streams and water supplies.

"I could see this new research development as a tool to in helping water authorities better understand which areas of a municipality input different waste streams into a wastewater treatment plant, and maybe through the use of new engineering techniques remove emerging contaminants that are problematic before they enter into the wastewater treatment plant."

As for the meth that's entering waste water treatment plants, it's not treated, said Boles. It could even up in lakes and streams of Tennessee, just like it has already been measured in surface waters in Europe, she said.

"It's just amazing what's in our waste water after treatment," said Boles. "We can't really effectively clean them up and we have a finite amount of water."